Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year

In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor - the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery quickly gave way to hopes of simply surviving hospital life, where confidence was hard to come by and no amount of med school training could dispel the terror of facing actual patients.

The House of God

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative journey that takes us into the lives of Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country.

Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis

In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis.

One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine

An epic story told by a unique voice in Ameri­can medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physi­cian. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.

Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated...Life Behind the O.R. Doors

As an active surgeon and former department chairman, Dr. Paul A. Ruggieri has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of his profession. In Confessions of a Surgeon, he pushes open the doors of the OR and reveals the inscrutable place where lives are improved, saved, and sometimes lost. He shares the successes, failures, remarkable advances, and camaraderie that make it exciting.

At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity

As a third-year Harvard Medical student doing a clinical rotation in surgery, Ronald Epstein watched an experienced surgeon fail to notice his patient's kidney turning an ominous shade of blue. In that same rotation, Epstein was awestruck by another surgeon's ability to slow down and shift between autopilot and intentionality. The difference between these two doctors left a lasting impression on Epstein and set the stage for his life's work - to identify the qualities and habits that distinguish masterful doctors from those who are merely competent.

How Doctors Think

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 12 seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong: with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make.

Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey

The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, MD, who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career.

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

In Miracles and Mayhem in the ER, Dr. Brent Russell shares true-life stories of his early days as an emergency room doctor. Contemplative and oftentimes hilarious, Dr. Russell leads the listener through the glass doors and down the narrow halls of the ER where desperate patients, young and old, come to get well. Occasionally heart wrenching and always fast-paced, Miracles and Mayhem in the ER will have listeners holding their breath one second and celebrating the next.

The Laws of Medicine

Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important audiobook is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and "eureka!" moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee's signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical book not just for those in the medical profession but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being are being treated.

Internal Medicine: Medical School Crash Course

AudioLearn's Medical School Crash Courses presents Internal Medicine. Written by experts and authorities in the field and professionally narrated for easy listening, this crash course is a valuable tool both during school and when preparing for the USMLE, or if you're simply interested in the subject.

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

In What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri has taken on the task of dissecting the hidden emotional responses of doctors, and how these directly influence patients. How do the stresses of medical life - from paperwork to grueling hours to lawsuits to facing death - affect the medical care that doctors can offer their patients? Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions - shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love - that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection.

Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach

This easy-to-listen guide organizes pharmacology into manageable, logical steps you can fit in short pockets of time. The proven system helps you memorize medications quickly and form immediate connections. With mnemonics from students and instructors, you'll see how both sides approach learning. After you've finished the 200 Top Drugs in this book, reading pharmacology exam questions will seem like reading plain English.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital

David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.

If you're looking to enter medical school in the United States, you'll almost certainly need a good, recent score in the standard MCAT. Nearly 50% of all MCAT test takers sit for the MCAT a second time due to inadequate preparation. Statistically, students who do well spend up to 300 hours preparing for the exam. It is our goal to make this process easier and more affordable than ever before.

Spanish for the Busy Medical Professional

Learn to communicate effectively with your Spanish speaking patients and their families in just five hours! Have you always wanted to learn Spanish but never found the time or the right teacher? Are you having trouble communicating with your Spanish speaking patients? Did you study Spanish in school, including medical school, but find yourself unable to construct even simple sentences in Spanish?

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

A thriving cardiologist, Jauhar has all the qualities you'd want in your own doctor: expertise, insight, a feel for the human factor, a sense of humor, and a keen awareness of the worries that we all have in common. His beautifully written memoir explains the inner workings of modern medicine with rare candor and insight.

Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives", Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care.

Publisher's Summary

The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. In his new audiobook, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.

Gawande's gripping stories of diligence, ingenuity, and what it means to do right by people take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, to labor and delivery rooms in Boston, to a polio outbreak in India, and to malpractice courtrooms around the country. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors' participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the astoundingly contentious history of hand washing.

And as in all his writing, Gawande gives us an inside look at his own life as a practicing surgeon, offering a searingly honest firsthand account of work in a field where mistakes are both unavoidable and unthinkable. At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey narrated by arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around. Gawande's investigation into medical professionals and how they progress from merely good to great provides rare insight into the elements of success, illuminating every area of human endeavor.

What the Critics Say

"Surgeon and MacArthur fellow Gawande applies his gift for dulcet prose to medical and ethical dilemmas in this collection." (Publishers Weekly) "Better is a masterpiece, a series of stories set inside the four walls of a hospital that end up telling us something unforgettable about the world outside." (Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point)

for anyone interested in the current state of health care and the medical field, for professionals, and those like me who aspire to be a doctor in my next life.

Seriously, this is an excellent book that covers very interesting and surprising issues related to improving medical care and outcomes. A few of the things Dr. Gawande touches on are cleanliness, battle injuries, eradicating polio, doctors' salaries, hospital excellence (or lack of), and practice of medicine in impoverished areas of India. Each topic had surprising information and was compellingly interesting to me. The author's intelligence, clear-thinking, and caring came through as the book progressed. He has a great deal to offer medical professionals and also the non-medical, average person, too.

John Bedford Lloyd did a fabulous narration. I never felt that he was reading someone elses book. He read it like it was his own. His voice is simply wonderful, too.

Though the narrative is slightly disjointed (the separate sections were not related to each other), I found each section fascinating on its own. The actor reading the book clearly didn't know a few of the words but in general did a good job with pronunciation of medical and science terms.

I am baffled how people are rating this so high. It is a rambling, discontinuous stream of conscious kind of work. I have purchased approximately 40 books on Audible and this is the first one that simply did not warrant finishing. At 2/3rds of the way, I surrendered---no more. I, too, am in a medical field and so was particularly attracted to this about getting better in practice and teaching. Nothing in this collection of anecdotes provides a basis for self-study insights toward improvement. The narrator is fine. In fact, he has my admiration for doing his job on this one.

This book was excellent and the reader did a very fine job. I enjoyed it all; writer Atul Gawande provides an incredible store of data, and that, coupled with his wide knowledge and experience as a surgeon, made this book a wonderful experience. However, I may buy the hard copy now--just to to be able to go over all the information at leisure. I am a relative newcomer to audiobooks, but even so, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I can't praise Gawande enough. I read the paperback edition of his book Complications and would recommend that highly to readers too.

This book is meant to address the science of human performance in medicine. It is, instead, an unfocused collection of anecdotes seasoned with facts drawn from the history of medicine (Semelweiss & Lister). I think the intent was to use each case to illustrate larger principles or themes, but this simply didn't happen. The stories seem randomly selected; they neither standout singlely for the wisdom they contain, nor do they build one upon the other. It would be like a research paper that's all methodology, but no results, no discussion, no conclusion.

The sections on efforts to eradicate polio and good CF programs vs great CF programs are especially long on exposition, and short on synthesis. Battlefield medicine is tough & expensive; we've had to work harder, spend more and try new things to get better survival results.
General surgeons in India don't have all the same resources as in North America, but they're willing to improvise.

The book ends(it doesn't conclude)with the authors tips on how to get better - "become a positive deviant." These don't appear to be based on the previous 7.5hours. More like, 'everything I need to know about improving my health care organization I learned in kindergarten.'
-talk to people
-listen to them
-write things down
-don't whine
-do things differently

Doctors of the Death chamber. This is the most interesting scene i've listened to. It is very interesting hearing about doctors that have are not only involved in saving lives but also involved in taking away lives. I know, but in this scene, Atul examines or interviews doctors in order to get answers as to why they are involved in prosecutions.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Im a premedical student trying to find answers on whether medicine is something for me. This book gives a very detailed insight on the life of being a doctor and somewhat compares it to other careers. If you are unsure/sure about doing medicine, this book is a great read.

I enjoyed the wide birth of topics pertinent to physicians discussed. From the business side of medicine no one ever discusses in medical school, to moral dilemas only doctors face; he gives variety in topics too little discussed and the information is more than useful.

Any additional comments?

I'd recommend this book to both aspiring doctors, as well as established physicians. Those considering the field can get a view of what comes along with that MD besides hefty loans and patients, and practicing Doctors should ever be on the quest to be

A very well written book, as good if not better than the first book. Great narration as well. I think this book would interest anyone in health care profession obviously. But, I am sure it would interest non health care professional reades as much.

A liked how he ended the book with some great but simple suggestions for his readers to be become what he call a positive deviant : Ask, Do not complain, Count, Write and Change.